More randomness.

I had a lovely dinner with friends last night – London Broil, Yukon Potatoes and Tossed Salad with Bleu Cheese dressing – yummy!  Good food, good company. 

~~~~~

Is your Droid sucking all of your battery up in mere hours?  No!  Bad Droid! 

I installed the Advanced Task Killer for Android on my HTC Incredible.  It’s supposed to save my battery life by closing Apps that aren’t in use.  I’m game.  Currently I have been getting about 5 hours of battery life on my phone (sob!), and the charging cord – for car, computer and wall charging have been constant companions.  Hopefully this will elongate my time between charges.

~~~~~

I signed up for my PADI Open Water Dive!  I’ll be taking my final classes at Golden Acres near Stillwater, MN in early July.  Hopefully the weather and the water will have warmed up a bit by then…grumble, grumble.  After the dives at Golden Acres I’ll be a PADI-certified Open  Water Diver, and just in time for Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast! 

We’re getting super excited for our trip – The Hubby and I spent a couple of hours last Saturday flipping through guide books at Barnes & Noble.  We leave for Italy on 7/18/10.  We’ll fly from Minneapolis to Rome (through Detroit – ah well).  When we arrive in Rome we’ll jump right on a train to Perugia, Umbria, Italy where we’ll meet up with Mom.  We’ll spend 7/19-7/28 romping around Italy.  We’ll spend the last three days of July in Rome.  On the way home we have a “forced” overnight layover in…Amsterdam!  We’ll get into Amsterdam at ~5:30pm and leave for Minneapolis at 2:30pm the next day.  Love it!  I’m excited about taking original photos for this blog, and about being able to write up some of our adventures here.  For now, take a gander at these shots from travelers who have gone before me:

 

Amalfi Coast – photo source

Sorrento Diving – photo source

Perugia, Umbria – photo source

Roman Forum, Rome – photo source

Amsterdam Downtown, aerial view – photo source

Doesn’t it look like FUN!?

More randomness.
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w00tstock v2.3 Minneapolis 2010

 NERDS!  EVERYWHERE!

Image Source

I swear, I had a grin on my face from 7pm when I found my nerd friends in the Guthrie lobby, until 12:15am when the w00tstock performers took their final bows and all of us nerds spilled out into the quiet Monday night downtown Minneapolis street – all of us complaining about having to go to work in 6 hours or so, all of us agreeing we would have stayed for another 6 hours of w00tstock if they would let us. 

This was w00tstock version 2.3, otherwise known as the Minneapolis 2010 w00tstock show.  The show claims to be three hours (or more).  Wil Wheaton started the intros at about 7:30pm, and final bows happened at about 12:15am (after a 19-minute-or-so rendition of the The Captain’s Wife’s Lament).  Allowing for a 15-minute intermission,  that’s a four-and-a-half hour show!

I guess w00tstock could be described as a nerd/geek variety show.  There were musical performances by Paul and Storm, Molly Lewis, Trace Beaulieu and Bill Corbett from MST3K), video interludes, and Wil Wheaton did a reading from his new book The Happiest Days of Our LivesThere was stand-up comedy from Tim Bedore and from John Scalzi, a physics lecture (with the maths and everything!) from James Kakalios, and some nerd proposed to his fiance in front of the entire audience.

This is one of the better quality videos that I have found on youtube from the performance.  This is Adam Savage performing I Will  Survive in the voice of Gollum.  While he was on stage, Adam – like a true nerd – had a random nosebleed, and since I guess he felt like he was in good company, he just shoved a tissue up his nostril and kept going.  That’s nerd pride!

These are some of my pics from far, far away.  The quality ain’t great (read: pretty darn not great in some cases), but they’re what I got.

 
 

Lord of the Rings Photoshop (Adam Savage, Storm, Paul, Wil Wheaton), Physics Professor James Kakalios with his Trivial Pursuit card and Paul, Trace Beaulieu, Bill Corbett and Storm singing together.

The whole gang together to sing a New National Anthem, Adam Savage on stage, and Neil Gaimen makes a suprise visit to deliver a single pirate “Arg” for the Captain’s Wife’s Lament.

This is a fairly decent video of Molly Lewis recorded in the day prior in Chicago (w00tstock v2.2 on Sunday 6/6/10).  The image isn’t great, but the audio is pretty smooth.  Molly is singing an awesome song called “An Open Letter to Stephen Fry”.  I never want to have children, but she makes some pretty persuasive arguments for child-bearing as a service to the greater good. 

It was a fabulous show, and I hope to be able to go again when 3.0 is released.  This is a version upgrade I will always buy!

*********
All photos are released in accordance with Creative Commons and are available for anyone to use provided they abide by CC.  Photos were taken and uploaded to this blog by biodork.  Some photos have been cropped to improve photo quality, but images remain otherwise unaltered.

w00tstock v2.3 Minneapolis 2010

Good Monday, um Tuesday.

Let’s start this short week off easy with a few grab bag pieces.

~~~~~

Storefront in a Box

I was alerted to an exciting series of events that is happening this summer in my South Minneapolis neighborhood.  In her Stribe article, A new store every week,  Kara McGuire describes Arise! Bookstore’s entrepreneurial efforts to keep their small store occupied in a move they’re calling “Storefront in a Box”.  This summer they’re renting out their store week by week to various artists and small business owners for approximately $200 a pop. 

The summer rental schedule can be found at the Storefront in a Box website.  So far the renters include Boneshaker Books, an Art Gallery and Gift Shop, Nerd Party, Bicycle Film Festival Presents, Pop Punk Emporium, Paper Darts Magazine Gallery, Internet Variety Store, Theateropolis, Courtney McClean & The Dirty Curls’ Weeklong Naughtybilly Hoedown, and Art Swap in a Box.  Phew!  There’s literally something new every week!

From McGuire’s article: 

There will be the Pop Punk Emporium, with a pop punk cover band, free punk haircuts and a museum with audio guide. There’s an art swap — for people to bring art and take art — and a bicycle film festival. There’s even a “Weeklong Naughtybilly Hoedown” filled with bad cowboy movies and jam sessions.

The Paper Darts literary journal will sell the summer issue as well as host readings, and the recently closed Play by Play Theatre bookstore of St. Paul will have some books for sale and host Theateropolis — a week of theater-themed classes and events.

 This is what I love about living in a big(ish) city – there’s always something to do!

~~~~~

For my favorite mad engineer, Senja.

Source: Cowbirds In Love   Click on the link for greater resolution.

~~~~~

And two stories via Pharyngula – One sobering, and one fun:

Sobering: There are over 4,000 oil rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico.

oilrigs.jpeg

Everyone is fixated on that one burning mess in the Gulf, which is probably exactly what the oil companies want — they are probably sweating pungent carcinogenic petrochemicals at the thought that someone might look around and notice all of those other rigs, which almost certainly have a paper trail of shortcuts and risks and shoddy management.

Scary.  Insert *shudder* here.

And now some FUN from Pharyngula:

Snazzy T-Shirts from HideYourArms.com:

Clever:

iWant:

Good Monday, um Tuesday.

Biology Funs!

It’s such an icky disease.  Can somebody just make it go away, please?

A cure for a disease that can up to 90% of infected individuals?  A cure for a disease that makes people bleed out of every orifice in their body and can kill them 2-21 days after the onset of symptoms?  I mean sure, the potential Ebolavirus cure has only been demonstrated in animal models, and there’s no real market for an Ebolavirus vaccine (which doesn’t offer a lot of financial payoff for development by private companies), but…

Oh wait, I’m sorry, did you say EBOLA CURE?   That’s wicked cool biology!

From a report in the Vancouver Sun by Chad Skelton:

At a high-security military lab at Fort Detrick, Md., [Dr. Thomas] Geisbert infected several rhesus monkeys with a high dose of the Zaire strain of Ebola, one of the deadliest and fastest-replicating forms of the virus.  Then, over the next seven days, four monkeys were given a single daily injection of the drug…by Day 10 of the study, the two “control monkeys” who hadn’t been given the drug were already dead, and the four treated monkeys were perfectly fine.  Among a second test group, given only four injections, two of three monkeys survived.

Wow!  I won’t bore you with all of the molecular biology, but if you’re interested, Wikipedia has a decent mid-level explanation of Ebola’s pathogenesis, transmission, signs and symptoms, treatment, prognosis, etc.

The original article by Dr. Geisbert can be found at thelancet.com under the very user-friendly title Postexposure protection of non-human primates against a lethal Ebola virus challenge with RNA interference: a proof-of-concept study.  Or just go to thelancet.com and search for “Ebola”.  You have to sign up for a free registration, but it’s quick and they don’t ask for a lot of personal info.  It’s worth muddling through the medical-ese if you want to know about the study methods, or about the science driving the potential cure.  I mean, who doesn’t want to read about small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and stable nucleic acid-lipid particles (SNALPs).  You know you do, you big nerd!

Right now it sounds like the most important reason for having an Ebola cure would be in the case of a biological attack using the virus.  Because naturally-occuring Ebola is rare, there aren’t any immediately apparent financial incentives for a private development company to invest in the necessary R&D and clinical studies.  The funding for Geisbert’s study comes from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a “Combat Support Agency for countering weapons of mass destruction” run out of the US Department of Defense.

~~~~~

On to a couple of more local and more macro biology funs:

Pretty spider web found outdoors in Chaska, MN:

~~~~~

My friend found this skull in the alley behind her South Minneapolis home.  Is it a bird – crow or raven?  The bone looks porous like bird bones and the jaw portion has got to be some sort of beak, wouldn’t you think?  We do have a lot of big black birds in this area…

Biology Funs!

Gone Fishin'

Saturday was a lot of fun.  I slept through my alarm…and by “slept through my alarm” I mean I turned the obnoxious thing off at 7am and went back to sleep.  So, I woke up four minutes before my 9am meetup time with friends for breakfast and fishing.  Luckily, breakfast and fishing means no makeup or fancy schmancy clothes, so I ended up being only about 15 minutes late.  Breakfast was good, but by 10am it had started raining.  Darn!  First fishing trip of the year cancelled.

Ah well.  We headed over to my friends’ house and played YouTube.  You know…when you all crowd around a computer and take turns sharing your favorite YouTube clips.  I shared a couple of Tim Minchin videos, which were received quite well, but the winner of YouTube was my buddy Q, who introduced me to a absolutely fabulous artist, Janelle Monae:

It looks like she has two full CDs out: Metropolis and ArchAndroid.  I’m psyched to do some reading about the albums because each album is composed of suites, which are made up of songs that are like chapters in a book.  From Wikipedia:

Metropolis Suite I of IV: The Chase: This EP introduces Monáe’s Metropolis conceptual series, following a fictional tale of female android Cindi Mayweather who is mass produced in the year 2719 for a market filled with severe social stratification.

ArchAndroid: Incorporating conceptual elements of Afrofuturism and science fiction, The ArchAndroid continues the series’s fictional tale of a messianic android and features lyrical themes of love, identity, and self-realization.

Fun!  Geeky!  Sci-Fi!  And she’s got great dance moves, kick-ass style, and a voice that blows me away.  I heart Janelle Monae.

~~~~~

And then the rain stopped!  We decided to brave the cloudy skies to go fishing.  I like fishing because my Dad taught me how to fish.  He took my sister and me to different lakes and parks near our house when I was growing up, and we also went fishing in my grandparent’s pond in southern Illinois, which was always stocked with well-fed (i.e., gigantic!) catfish.

But I’m kind of impatient when it comes to fishing – there’s not a lot of zen in it for me.  I practice catch-and-release because I don’t like killing things, but then I feel guilty because I’m just playing with the poor thing instead catching it to eat.  Soooo not logical.

We wanted to go fishing in Fort Snelling State Park because you don’t need an angling license for MN state parks.  I had heard of Fort Snelling State Park, but in the five or six years that I’ve been in the Twin Cities, I’d never actually found my way over there and I wasn’t positive of the location.  First we headed to Fort Snelling…like, the actual Fort.  Turns out Fort Snelling and Fort Snelling State Park are in completely different locations.  We eventually found the right area using my new phone’s internet and google maps features.  Fun – it was kind of like Midnight Madness!

Fort Snelling State Park…wow.  All I can say is that I can’t believe I’ve never been here before.  It’s fantastic.  I don’t know if you know this…but it’s kind of a big deal (I love you, Ron Burgundy).    There are areas where the river rushes alongside smaller, quieter lakes, and different branches of the Minnesota river converge in places throughout the park.  We saw people biking, fishing, hiking and canoeing, and Q swears he saw two beavers!

We found this awesome fishing spot – see the large sunken branches in the photo below?  That’s where the fish like to take shelter (mwah ha ha – we’re on to you, fishies!).  There were gigantic bass swimming around this area and plenty of sunfish.  It isn’t quite bass season yet, so we were using smaller bait intended for the sunfish, but it didn’t really matter because nobody was biting.  In the background you can sort of make out the turtles sunning themselves on the farthest log.

We didn’t catch anything, which was great for me because my buddies like to eat the fish they catch, and I promised that I’d let them keep anything I caught.  I like tying on lures with the special “fisherman’s knot” that Dad taught me, so when I got bored of not catching fish I amused myself by changing out various ridiculously huge lures just for the fun of casting and reeling them through the water.

~~~~~

Saturday evening the Hubby and I went to the Vali Hi Drive In in Lake Elmo with our friend Courtney.  The screen is a large, flat, white billboard-like sign and the film is projected onto it.  The first show starts at dusk (~9pm this time of year), and if you don’t get to the theater early (7-8pm), you get stuck in the waaaaay back and to the sides – like we did below.  To be fair, we were on-track to get to the theater around 8pm, but then we got sidetracked by a crazy search for Noodles in Woodbury and then we got all  turned around in the construction on 494/694.  We finally rolled into the theater at ~8:45pm.

The shows for Saturday night were Shrek 4, Ironman 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street – three new release movies for $8/person!  Of course, the Hubby and I never make it through the third movie, so we really only look at what’s playing for the first two shows.

Vali Hi is neat because people get to the theater early to claim a spot and set up “camp” – you can grill out, play frisbee or toss a football around, and sit around in big ol’ camping chairs shooting the breeze until the show starts.  Below is a picture of the Hubby and Courtney in our set-up.  We line the bed of the truck with all of the cushions from our couches, and we grab two or three blankets, the snack food and beverages.  Some people get *really* elaborate.  In the picture above, you can see the guy in front of us getting ready to spread a blanket out on the top of his SUV.  We saw one couple in an Ford F250 who had set up a small loveseat and coffee table in the bed of their truck!

Shrek was eh…Ironman 2 was decent, and we rolled out of the theater after that.  That put us back in Minneapolis at about 1pm, with a full day left of the weekend.  I’d call this another successful Saturday.

Gone Fishin'

Gone Fishin’

Saturday was a lot of fun.  I slept through my alarm…and by “slept through my alarm” I mean I turned the obnoxious thing off at 7am and went back to sleep.  So, I woke up four minutes before my 9am meetup time with friends for breakfast and fishing.  Luckily, breakfast and fishing means no makeup or fancy schmancy clothes, so I ended up being only about 15 minutes late.  Breakfast was good, but by 10am it had started raining.  Darn!  First fishing trip of the year cancelled.

Ah well.  We headed over to my friends’ house and played YouTube.  You know…when you all crowd around a computer and take turns sharing your favorite YouTube clips.  I shared a couple of Tim Minchin videos, which were received quite well, but the winner of YouTube was my buddy Q, who introduced me to a absolutely fabulous artist, Janelle Monae:

It looks like she has two full CDs out: Metropolis and ArchAndroid.  I’m psyched to do some reading about the albums because each album is composed of suites, which are made up of songs that are like chapters in a book.  From Wikipedia:

Metropolis Suite I of IV: The Chase: This EP introduces Monáe’s Metropolis conceptual series, following a fictional tale of female android Cindi Mayweather who is mass produced in the year 2719 for a market filled with severe social stratification.

ArchAndroid: Incorporating conceptual elements of Afrofuturism and science fiction, The ArchAndroid continues the series’s fictional tale of a messianic android and features lyrical themes of love, identity, and self-realization.

Fun!  Geeky!  Sci-Fi!  And she’s got great dance moves, kick-ass style, and a voice that blows me away.  I heart Janelle Monae.

~~~~~

And then the rain stopped!  We decided to brave the cloudy skies to go fishing.  I like fishing because my Dad taught me how to fish.  He took my sister and me to different lakes and parks near our house when I was growing up, and we also went fishing in my grandparent’s pond in southern Illinois, which was always stocked with well-fed (i.e., gigantic!) catfish.

But I’m kind of impatient when it comes to fishing – there’s not a lot of zen in it for me.  I practice catch-and-release because I don’t like killing things, but then I feel guilty because I’m just playing with the poor thing instead catching it to eat.  Soooo not logical.

We wanted to go fishing in Fort Snelling State Park because you don’t need an angling license for MN state parks.  I had heard of Fort Snelling State Park, but in the five or six years that I’ve been in the Twin Cities, I’d never actually found my way over there and I wasn’t positive of the location.  First we headed to Fort Snelling…like, the actual Fort.  Turns out Fort Snelling and Fort Snelling State Park are in completely different locations.  We eventually found the right area using my new phone’s internet and google maps features.  Fun – it was kind of like Midnight Madness!

Fort Snelling State Park…wow.  All I can say is that I can’t believe I’ve never been here before.  It’s fantastic.  I don’t know if you know this…but it’s kind of a big deal (I love you, Ron Burgundy).    There are areas where the river rushes alongside smaller, quieter lakes, and different branches of the Minnesota river converge in places throughout the park.  We saw people biking, fishing, hiking and canoeing, and Q swears he saw two beavers!

We found this awesome fishing spot – see the large sunken branches in the photo below?  That’s where the fish like to take shelter (mwah ha ha – we’re on to you, fishies!).  There were gigantic bass swimming around this area and plenty of sunfish.  It isn’t quite bass season yet, so we were using smaller bait intended for the sunfish, but it didn’t really matter because nobody was biting.  In the background you can sort of make out the turtles sunning themselves on the farthest log.

We didn’t catch anything, which was great for me because my buddies like to eat the fish they catch, and I promised that I’d let them keep anything I caught.  I like tying on lures with the special “fisherman’s knot” that Dad taught me, so when I got bored of not catching fish I amused myself by changing out various ridiculously huge lures just for the fun of casting and reeling them through the water.

~~~~~

Saturday evening the Hubby and I went to the Vali Hi Drive In in Lake Elmo with our friend Courtney.  The screen is a large, flat, white billboard-like sign and the film is projected onto it.  The first show starts at dusk (~9pm this time of year), and if you don’t get to the theater early (7-8pm), you get stuck in the waaaaay back and to the sides – like we did below.  To be fair, we were on-track to get to the theater around 8pm, but then we got sidetracked by a crazy search for Noodles in Woodbury and then we got all  turned around in the construction on 494/694.  We finally rolled into the theater at ~8:45pm.

The shows for Saturday night were Shrek 4, Ironman 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street – three new release movies for $8/person!  Of course, the Hubby and I never make it through the third movie, so we really only look at what’s playing for the first two shows.

Vali Hi is neat because people get to the theater early to claim a spot and set up “camp” – you can grill out, play frisbee or toss a football around, and sit around in big ol’ camping chairs shooting the breeze until the show starts.  Below is a picture of the Hubby and Courtney in our set-up.  We line the bed of the truck with all of the cushions from our couches, and we grab two or three blankets, the snack food and beverages.  Some people get *really* elaborate.  In the picture above, you can see the guy in front of us getting ready to spread a blanket out on the top of his SUV.  We saw one couple in an Ford F250 who had set up a small loveseat and coffee table in the bed of their truck!

Shrek was eh…Ironman 2 was decent, and we rolled out of the theater after that.  That put us back in Minneapolis at about 1pm, with a full day left of the weekend.  I’d call this another successful Saturday.

Gone Fishin’

Who needs sleep?

Last weekend was incredible – I’m just starting to recover!  Let me tell you what I did…

On Friday night, I went to the first classroom session of my SCUBA class!  The class took place in a teensy, tiny 9-chair classroom in the basement of the Minneapolis Scuba Center.  The lessons were brief.  They were very much a high level review of the textbook, so it’s a good thing I actually did all of the assigned reading and in-book quizzes and tests. 

After I got back from class at 10pm, the Hubby and I went walking through LynLake and Uptown.  It was an excellent spring evening, and the crowds were out!  The yuppies were dolled up and standing on the sidewalks, waiting to get into Chino Latino and Stella’s.  The slightly hipper yuppies were sitting outside at the Bryant Lake Bowl and Sauce.  We took a ride on an almost-completely-built bike taxi – which was fun and a little scary – and we discovered a new comic store in Uptown, which always makes me happy.   The shop was closed when we walked by, but I snapped a picture of the store and an awesome decal on the front window.

~~~~~

Bright and early on Saturday morning I rode the motorcycle out to Eagan for the last scuba classroom session, the final test and our first water lessons.  I aced the final, which came with the dubious honor of having a minute trimmed off of my 10-minute tread (the water was 88°F – I would have rather stayed in than stood shivering on the pool deck!).  After a 200-meter swim, we set up our equipment for the first time.  We put the BCD on the tank, attached the regulator to all of the right places, turned on the air (important skill, that one) and lowered the whole mess into the water.  Then we all hopped in and helped each other shrug into our gear. 

PADI Certification | Beginning Scuba Diving Lessons | PADI Open Water Diver Certificatioin Class enjoying the heated indoor pool at Scuba Center in Eagan, Minnesota. | PADI Open Water Diver Certification classes are small, limited to a maximum of eight to ten students per PADI Instructor during pool (Confined Water) training, to assure personal attention and fun while learning to Scuba dive. | Certification classes offered in Eagan, Minnesota and Minneapolis, Minnesota

photo source

We mostly stayed in the shallow end on day 1.  We followed a PADI skills list and learned how to communicate and stay with our dive buddy underwater, how to clear water from our masks and regulators, how to detach and re-attach our low-pressure inflator from the BCD, how to breathe from a free-flowing regulator, how to equalize our ears and masks, how to haul our buddy in a “tired swimmer” tank pull and body push, how to ease a leg cramp underwater, and all sorts of other skills. 

~~~~~

Saturday evening, the Hubby and I went to a party at a friend’s house.  There were probably about 30 people who came and went on that night, and we got to meet some new people – always fun!  We went home relatively early because I was exhausted from messing around in a pool for three hours 🙂

~~~~~

I had Sunday morning free, so I decided to head over to Valleyfair.  This was the 2010 season’s opening weekend for the amusement park, and I love me some roller coasters and thrill rides.  See?  I even know that there’s a difference between roller coasters and thrill rides!  The weather was perfect and was kind enough to give me a brilliant blue sky – perfect for pictures!

    
 

     
 

There are my two favorite photos from the park:

  

~~~~~

Cut to early afternoon:  Back to Eagan for the last day of pool scuba lessons.  The instructor made us put our equipment together and take it apart four times in a row.  Damn, that’s a lot of equipment!  But I’m glad he made us do it – I should be able to remember how to set up for the Open Water dive class next month.  At one point we were sitting at the bottom of the 12-foot pool for 45-minutes straight!  We did a few buoyancy exercises, but that’s a skill I know I’ll need to work on.  It’s really hard to sit in one place in the water and not float to the surface or sink to the bottom!  Swimming or moving at a certain depth – no problem.  Hovering was a little harder.  But in the end we all passed the pool portion of the scuba lessons!

~~~~~

Back in Minneapolis, later that afternoon, the Hubby and I went down to the LynLake block party.  The shops between 31st and Lake Street were open, a few Art Cars were parked in the center of the block, and a stage was set up by the intersection of 31st and Lyndale. 

This dude thought maybe one more cup would fit….some people’s kids, I tell ya.  I watched this garbage can for about three minutes, and people just kept tossing garbage in the general direction of the overflowing trash bin.  Either that, or they’d shove something in from one direction, and three pieces would fall out another side.  Seriously?

We walked a block up from the block party to Pizza Luce!  Yummy gluten-free appetizers and pizza.  Thank you Pizza Luce in South Minneapolis for finally adopting the full-time gluten-free menu!

   

~~~~~

Phew.  And then I collapsed for a few hours!

Who needs sleep?

May Day

The Hubby and I went to the Minneapolis May Day Parade on Sunday!

The Minneapolis May Day Celebration is hosted every year by the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater (HOBT).  The parade starts at the theater, which is located at the intersection of East Lake Street and Bloomington Avenue, and progresses down Bloomington to Powderhorn Park.

The Hubby and I brushed the winter storage grime and dust off of our bikes and rode the 1.5 miles to 31st St. and Bloomington.  We wanted to arrive early; the parade was scheduled to start at 1pm, and Bloomington is usually pretty packed by the time things kick off.  We found a sweet patch of curb underneath a shady tree and settled in to watch people arrive.  Some people were in parade costumes, some not, and everyone arrived on foot or by bike (if they drove, the eventually had to arrive on Bloomington by foot!).  May Day is alway great for people watching.  We were also right across the street from a bunch of guys and gals who set up speakers, keyboards, guitars, tambourines and entertained the crowds before the parade started.

The parade is split into two parts: First is the HOBT dancers and puppeteers.  This year’s theme was Uproar! HOBT presented the theme in four “scenes”: Growl, Breathe, Return and Roar.

After the HOBT section of the parade went through, the second part – the join in section – marched by. The join in section consists of any group that wants to march and share their message with the public.  There is no restriction on content, except that the message and the delivery be peaceful.   This year I was excited to see (and shake hands with!) Mpls Mayor RT Ryback and DFL gubernatorial candidate Margaret Anderson Kelliher.  Rep. gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer and former House Minority leader Matt Entenza were also marching.  Aside from politicians, there were drumlines, dance groups, bands, an anti-scientology group, nurses, union groups, churches, atheists, anarchists, and many, many more.  I was sad that I didn’t see any art cars as part of the parade, but the multi-level and custom bike dudes and dudettes were out!

My two favorite pictures from the Parade:

We had a great time, and we ran into several friends at the parade.  After the last of the groups marched by, the Hubby and I rode our bikes down to Powderhorn Park and walked around the the May Day Festival.  As always, the park was absolutely crammed full of people.  We avoided most of it by walking below the vendors and organization booths along the lake shore.  The temperature had dipped down and the wind was picking up around this time, so we headed out and wrapped up May Day with lunch at the Midtown Global Market (seen rising up in the background behind May Day tents) and a nice, although blustery, ride home via the Greenway.

May Day

SCUBA!

Ever since I learned about scuba diving, I’ve wanted to do it.  I love being underwater.  I love the way that the physics I experience on ground is turned on its ear – Underwater I’m weightless, and plants, animals and detris flow in the invisible currents.  Sandy bottoms disperse and reform with the slightest encouragement.  Light defracts differently than on land.  Movement is fluid and graceful.  Temperature shifts in inches.  In wild environments,   I love the foreign critters and plant life.  And breathing underwater is such a triumph – a conquering of a foreign environment that still today holds so many mysteries!

So far I haven’t been certified in scuba for two reasons:  Money and Necessity.  Getting certified in scuba can be pricey, averaging ~$300 for training and certification, figure another ~$100 for the open water dive course, pricey equipment if you decide to invest in owning, and also pricey if you rent.  As for necessity: I was raised and currently live in the Midwest, and there’s not a lot of easily accessible diving around here, although Minnesota has more opportunity for freshwater diving that the suburbs of Chicago!   Also, I don’t know a lot of people who are scuba-certified, and thus I had no diving buddies. 

But I’ve finally decided to do it.  I realized that if I died tomorrow, one of my big regrets would be that I never experienced scuba diving, and as easy as it is to get certified…well, that’s a silly thing to regret.  Sadly, getting my scuba certification is not without sacrifice – I’m passing on the iPhone that I was planning on getting in May when my Verizon contract comes to an end.  I’ll be hanging on to my three separate devices (camera, phone, iPod Touch) for a while longer.  Fare well, iPhone, I never knew thee!

I’m getting my certification from the descriptively named Scuba Center in Minneapolis on May 14-16th.  I have a Friday night class, and then two classes on Saturday, followed by a pool class on Sunday afternoon.  Wham Bam!  After that I’ve got six months to do my open water dive. 

When I signed up, the store employee went through about 300 forms, which I have laid out on my kitchen table in the picture below.  I had to sign my name a couple dozen times, and then finally the swiping of the debit card.  It’s official! 

Aside from the new diver magazines, class offering descriptions and glossy equipment sales catalogues, I received a two-DVD set and two course books that I have to finish before the first class on May 14th.

The blue text book has five chapters and end-of-chapter quizzes, and is meant to be completed in conjunction with the 3 hours of video training.  The Use and Choose Dive Computers manual contains two additional chapters of homework. 

Along with all of this, Scuba Center requires students to supply their own mask, fins and snorkel for both hygiene and fit purposes.  The scuba mask has to be made of tempered glass and has to fit my face, the fins have to be scuba fins (sturdier, broader from what I understand) and the snorkel is nothing special, but they just want you to use your own.  They of course offer excellent deals on their own inventory for new students 🙂

And lastly, I also have a dive buddy!  I know of at least one good friend who lives in the area and loves to dive.

Looks like I’m all set.

SCUBA!

Giving you the biz.

Random Updates and My Latest Amusements:

I picked up the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  It’s all orchestral (symphonic?), and it makes the BEST study/paperwork music, because there are no words to listen to or hypnotizing beats in the background.  Geeky and productive!

On Sunday we had yummy Buca di Beppo Italian Easter Dinner with The Hubby’s family.  Fried calamari, stuffed mushrooms, breaded mozzerella, caesar salad, stuffed shells, ravioli, chicken saltimbocca.  Mmmm…

The Hubby bought rollerblades!  He has always been hesitant to try in-line skates.  He is scared to break something (he’s an old man, you know), and he’s 6’3″, so he already has a long way to fall without adding another 4-6″.  The first time we went out he was so cute and funny, wobbling around like a newborn calf!

If you have access to facebook, check out the cutest video of me and my friend Elizabeth messing with her daughter, Edie.

The bookstore is having a sale and I was able to pick up some inexpensive Italian language materials so that I can learn a few nicities for my potential trip to Italy this summer.  Molto buono!  Divertimento!  The only sucky thing is that something is wrong with my Mac – it won’t let me install my old Spanish-language Rosetta Stone CD or my brand-spankin’ new Italian Berlitz CD.  I haven’t tried to install anything else by CD…   Bummer, I think a trip to the Genius Bar is going to be unavoidable this time.  Ciò è triste.

Giving you the biz.